‘PATHOLOGICAL FRIENDLINESS’
Debut author Jennifer Latson offers a poignant, touching account of a boy with Williams Syndrome, a genetic disorder that makes him love everyone he meets.
In a world where everything made sense, you’d expect people whose hearts overflow with love to be rewarded with great relationships and extravagantly successful lives. Yet even as they brim with qualities most of us say we admire, those who live with the strange genetic condition known as Williams Syndrome struggle to make their way among fellow humans who don’t quite know what to make of them.
People with Williams feel intense affection and unquestioning trust for everyone they meet. When she learned about it, author Jennifer Latson was indignant that Williams was considered a disorder; wouldn’t the world be a better place, she thought, if everyone behaved this way?
But Latson’s attitude changed in the six years she spent researching and writing “The Boy Who Loved Too Much.” Through reading, interviewing experts and observing the daily lives of a boy with Williams and his family, she began to see that the characteristics of this condition were at best a mixed blessing.
Latson, a former Houston Chronicle reporter met Eli, her main subject, when he was 12. Her engrossing book follows his life with his mother, Gayle, from infancy until he starts high school. (Gayle, Eli and the names of other family members in the book are pseudonyms.)
Latson’s account of Gayle learning about her son’s condition is one of the book’s most powerful scenes. In 2000, Gayle was struggling to understand her baby’s unusual behavior and developmental delays — he wasn’t even crawling at 13 months, an age when friends’ children were walking. Medical tests were inconclusive, and experts who observed Eli were charmed by him but stumped by his problems.
A fellow day-care mom who happened to be a pediatrician suggested that Eli might have a rare condition called Williams Syndrome. As soon as she could get to a computer, Gayle looked up the term:
“Her hands shook as she typed the words into a search engine. She clicked on the first website she saw, an online medical dictionary, and scanned the screen quickly. She read as much as she could before her eyes filled with tears and blurred the words. Then she ducked her head over her trash can and threw up.”
Gayle soon learned that in addition to its behavioral and developmental symptoms, Williams was associated with significant health problems, including a dangerous narrowing of the main blood vessel leading from the heart.
During the weeks she waited for an appointment with a geneticist to confirm the diagnosis, Gayle alternated between resenting friends with “normal” children and frantically trying to convince herself that Eli didn’t really have this strange condition. Latson’s account of the young mother’s desperate denial — digging out photos of family members who seemed to share certain physical traits with Eli but didn’t have Williams, for example — is heartbreaking.
Eli’s father, Alan in the book, disappears from the story shortly after the diagnosis. The couple separated when Eli was 8; Latson writes that Gayle preferred not to talk in detail about the split. The end of the marriage left Gayle, with help from her mother and other family members, with the sole responsibility of meeting her son’s enormous, unconventional needs.
Gayle, in fact, is as important to Latson’s story as is Eli. She emerges as a fully formed character: fiercely protective, stubborn, unconventional, resourceful and tough. She struggles to restrain her son’s powerful impulse to throw his arms around everyone he sees; this trait is endearing in a 3-year-old, less so in a teenager.
Gayle is enormously self-sacrificing, perhaps to a fault. As Eli grows older, Gayle begins to question her constant vigilance and confront the fact that being his mother has become the sole basis of her identity. She makes some tentative efforts to attend to her own needs.
Gayle and Eli’s story is interspersed with sections explaining the science of Williams, including its important role in the broader study of genetics. Readers lacking a strong scientific bent might find themselves
impatient for Latson to wrap up the wonky stuff and get back to Eli and his mom. But “The Boy Who Loved Too Much” would be a lesser book without this information, and Latson does a good job of making complex scientific concepts understandable and integrating this material into the personal story.
Latson’s scenes of Gayle and Eli’s life are replete with details that enrich the narrative. We see the pink bedspread in a hotel room where they stayed during a road trip; we observe a woman shifting her weight from one foot to the other while preparing to deliver unwanted news; we meet a waitress in a diner with a spiky hairdo and a rose tattoo on her forearm. In an author’s note, Latson says details she didn’t witness were confirmed through interviews.
Only once or twice does Latson resort to cliché (when she hears Eli’s condition confirmed, “Gayle’s heart dropped into her stomach, which in turn seemed to drop to the floor.”) For the most part, her prose is fresh and engaging, her story leavened with humor to take the edge off the ongoing struggle of characters we have come to care about deeply.
It would be a mistake to squeeze this book into the “disease narrative” genre. It transcends that niche, partly through the author’s reflections on what our reactions to people with Williams Syndrome have to say about the human condition.
In a sense, these loving, vulnerable people represent an almost holy kind of innocence — an impractical human ideal. Perhaps Gayle’s selfless struggle, and Eli’s eternally open arms, can inspire the rest of us.
Peoplefeel Williams intense with affection and unquestioning trust for everyone they meet … (author Jennifer) Latson was indignant that Williams was considered a disorder; wouldn’t the world be a better place, she thought, if everyone behaved this way?